Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

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Each of these books taxonomizes the passing of anything that even remotely looked like it could be described naively as the "American Dream."
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Essays

Conquering Hell

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Heaven and Hell have always been located in the human mind, along with God and the Devil, but the mind is a vast country, full of strange dreams and unaccounted things.
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Essays

Drizzly November in My Soul

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For those with a brain chemistry that doesn't incline towards darkness, depression might seem an issue of will power, something to be fixed with a multivitamin and treadmill. Reading Burton reminds us that depression isn't a personal failing.
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Essays

And the Walls Came Down

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Every word is a metaphor; every phrase, no matter how prosaic, is a poem—even if it's mute. Words don't correspond to reality; they only correspond to one another.
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Essays

Nothing Outside the Text

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Close reading is sometimes slandered as brutal vivisection, but it's really a manner of possession. In the sifting through of diction and syntax, grammar and punctuation, image and figuration, there are pearls.
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Essays

This Isn’t the Essay’s Title

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Whether or not paradoxes are glitches in how we arrange our words or due to something more intrinsic, they signify a null-space where the regular ways of thinking, of understanding, of writing, no longer hold.
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Essays

Circles of the Damned

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For centuries artists have mined Inferno for raw materials, but now in the sweltering days of the Anthropocene we are enacting it.
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Essays

Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story

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Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page.
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Essays

The World Is All That Is the Case

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When you come to Ludwig Wittgenstein on the road, you must kill him. The knife that you use is entitled the Tractatus, and he'll hand it to you first.
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Essays

On Memory and Literature

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Now we're all possessors of personal supercomputers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul.
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Essays

Elegy of the Walker

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Sojourn into a world so foreign was the birthright of the first humans, and it still is today, if you choose it.
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On Poetry

Henry Vaughan’s Eternal Alchemy

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What faith teaches is that we're all exiles from that Zion that is eternity, to which we shall one day return. What Vaughan understands is that if we seek eternity, it is now.
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Essays

Marvelous Mutable Marvell

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Marvell's own dwindling fame is a beautiful aesthetic pronouncement, a living demonstration of time's winged chariot, and the buzzing of the wings of oblivion forever heard as a distant hum.
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Essays

On Literature and Consciousness

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This is the greatest opening line in imaginative literature, because it’s the first one ever written. How can the invention of fiction itself be topped?
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Essays

Annotate This: On Footnotes

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Footnotes are several things at once – labyrinth, but also diagram; honeycomb and map; portrait of thought and bibliographic graveyard.
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Essays

Ten Ways to Lose Your Literature

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Just as all literature is haunted by the potential of oblivion, so all lost books are animated by the redemptive hope of their rediscovery.
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Essays

Letter from the Capitol

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The terrible logic of America is that our deepest nightmares and desires always have a way of enacting themselves, of moving from celluloid to reality.
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Essays

On Dreams and Literature

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Dreaming and reading are unified in being activities of fully created, totally self-contained realities.
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